More painting

     As I've mentioned before, I took my mother nine days to paint one of my bedrooms. You might see this as evidence that my mother is a perfectionist, perfectly placing every stroke, but that is not the case. In that bedroom, she had to paint the walls, the ceilings, the doors, the closets, the windows, even the heating grates. Four times. Because everything was deep blue, and needed two coats of primer and two coats of paint.
     The previous owners were detail oriented. I will end up replacing almost every electrical outlet (and not just the face plate, but the part you plug into as well), because they've all been painted. Faced with this level of repainting work, and noting that I will not be any faster than my mother, I realized that I was going to be painting until next November if I didn't figure out a better way.
So I planned for this three-day weekend to be a painting bonanza. I spent a week prepping, and two guys and I are painting for a total of 24 hours this weekend. At the end, I'll still have two rooms left to paint, but we will likely have completed the kitchen, the upstairs hall, and the upstairs bedroom. all the walls that we are painting have fake wood paneling, so the work isn't as straightforward as drywall- there's sometimes prep sanding, and you have to work to get paint into those little fake wood grooves.
     I'm already a bit exhausted from all the prep work, which was more extensive than I realized. I drove all over town, borrowing supplies and ladders from everyone I knew. I researched how to hire day laborers. (This will probably be a whole separate post, because I've learned so much.) I worried about my lack of Spanish skills. One evening, I spent a whole hour sitting on my stairs, talking to my friend N while we brainstormed ladder/scaffolding solutions that would let me paint the stairwell. I planned hot lunches, based on meat (!) because providing lunch for the workers is typical here.
     This morning, one day in, I'm stiff from climbing up and down the scaffold and scrubbing walls, but I'm super excited to see less blue fake wood paneling in my life. I'll be sure to post pictures when we're all done.